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Michael Press Profile picture
Michael Press
@MichaelDPress
Researcher @ UiA #LyingPen | writings on cultural heritage, antiquities trade @TheTLS @HistoryToday @aeonmag @hyperallergic @ChicagoMag @TAReviewofBooks
Aug 11, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The headline for this was originally "Why did the Museum of the Bible have to return 17,000 ancient artifacts?", but then the Post discovered that 1000s were actually returned by Cornell & changed it
(The url and the Twitter card reflect the original)
washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/… Current headline:
Jul 8, 2021 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
The strangeness of this article is perfectly symbolized by what looks like a fashion photoshoot featuring a BM curators with props.
telegraph.co.uk/art/architectu…
h/t @PortantIssues It's good that the article does not continue Simpson's insistence that looting in the Middle East mostly stopped after 2003-04.
Jul 5, 2021 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
How does Shaked/Ford/Bhayro's 2013 publication of the Schøyen Collection Aramaic incantation bowls deal with provenance? This is an interesting case, worth looking at a bit.

From the EBSCOhost ebook, it would seem the word "provenance" doesn't occur in the book . . . But in fact this appears to be a case of poorly-done OCR, as the word does occur.
Jun 28, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Amazing that this is the full provenance statement for a Palmyrene funerary relief in a reputable academic journal in 2014 -- around the height of the Syrian Civil War. Image To be fair, that's not quite it: in the footnote, the author thanks the gallery for permission to publish and for providing photos. Image
Apr 10, 2021 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
This is a really interesting review by Moses Finley of several books on archaeology, published in 1966.
Thanks @EirikWelo
nybooks.com/articles/1966/… Among those under review is Leo Deuel's Testaments of Time (1965), which started my interest in the review.
Apr 9, 2021 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Has anyone heard of the book Testaments of Time by Leo Deuel? It's a popular account of manuscript hunting, first published in 1965. @EvaMroczek @LivLied It's a broad survey of the material, what you might expect for 1965: starts with Renaissance humanists, and moves on to chapters on Tischendorf, the Cairo Geniza, Oxyrhynchus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, but also a range of other things . . .
Apr 8, 2021 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Jerusalem Post has an interview with Eitan Klein (deputy director of IAA's theft prevention unit) about the recent announcement of Judean Desert finds.
Several things here worth attention . . .
jpost.com/jerusalem-repo… Klein repeats the claim that the trigger for the survey project came with the appearance of the "Jerusalem Papryrus" on the antiquities market -- without noting that it's likely a forgery. Image
Mar 18, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
A week after a settlement reached between Sotheby's, the Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, & other parties regarding the cancelation of the museum's sale of objects, the museum's director announces he's leaving his position at the end of the month.
haaretz.com/israel-news/cu… For background on the cancelation of the sale:
Mar 16, 2021 • 36 tweets • 12 min read
Feels like the IAA is saying *TAKE THAT, MOSES SHAPIRA*
haaretz.com/archaeology/.p… To be clear, these new find is *not* from Qumran -- it consists of fragments of a slightly later Bar Kokhba scroll from Wadi Murabba'at (Nahal Darga) to the south. Image
Mar 10, 2021 • 36 tweets • 14 min read
Special #ShapiraBookClub edition:
James Tabor with an interesting but ultimately discouraging post on Shapira's Deuteronomy strips
jamestabor.com/moses-shapira-…
h/t @ReligionProf What's discouraging is that scholars continue to publicly pronounce that they think blatant forgeries might be genuine & that we need to keep having pointless debates about them for decades.
Here, not just Tabor but archaeologist Shimon Gibson. Image
Feb 12, 2021 • 35 tweets • 10 min read
Happy to say that my review of Veritas, and the saga of the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” forgery, is now published at @TheTLS.
the-tls.co.uk/articles/verit… (Note: As usual, the author was not responsible for the title or the lead photo.)
Feb 11, 2021 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
Reports of damage by Palestinian road work to Mt. Ebal -- in Area B of the West Bank.
What's actually going on here? Let's take a look . . .
jpost.com/archaeology/jo… The only English reports I've seen are from right-wing Israeli media, which emphasize the outrage among conservative members of the Knesset and settler organizations.
Oct 4, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
I have a research project on the antiquities market in Jerusalem in the late 19th century and am now seriously regretting not starting in the mid-20th century instead.

Amazing thread (& folder posted by the IAA), may be of interest @arsteinjustnes Anyone know what happened to the Zion Research Library ("a nonsectarian Protestant library for the study of the Bible and the history of the Christian Church") of Brookline Massachusetts & its Dead Sea Scroll jar? @MaterializingB
Oct 2, 2020 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
"After seeing the pyramid, all other architecture seems but pastry."
Herman Melville at Giza (Journal Of A Visit To Europe And The Levant 1856-1857) Image "The tearing away of the casing, though it removed enough stone to build a walled-town, has not subtracted from its apparent magnitude. It has had the contrary effect." Image
Jul 14, 2020 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
An interesting article on a 14th-century waqf oath by the heads of the village of Zakariyya (in the foothills southwest of Jerusalem), and the fate of the village.

Zakariyya has an interesting story, including its name . . .
972mag.com/palestinian-vi… As the article notes, there is an apparent connection with the site of Azekah.
Near Zakariya is the mound of Tell Zakariya, identified by scholars since the 19th century as biblical Azekah.

(Mandate Survey of Palestine map via palopenmaps.org) Image
Jun 22, 2020 • 24 tweets • 8 min read
Not sure the world needs yet another rehash of the debate about David and Solomon in Israeli archaeology, but if you're interested this one is well-written at least.

Some observations . . .
newyorker.com/magazine/2020/… David may be an important figure, but for what religious or cultural group is he "the most central thing in the Bible"? (maybe for earlier Zionists?)
Moses, Jesus, clearly not important. Image
May 29, 2020 • 25 tweets • 11 min read
We love to share these striking painted portraits from Roman Egypt, but we usually don't pay attention to some really important things about them -- like how museums got hold of them (the Louvre doesn't either!)

A thread on the darker side of these Egyptian painted portraits. These are often called "Faiyum portraits", because many of them come from the area of the Faiyum oasis south of the Delta.
But they've been also found at other sites throughout Egypt.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Faiy…
May 28, 2020 • 27 tweets • 8 min read
Times of Israel reports (as do Haaretz & NatGeo) on a new genetic study of dozens of individuals from the Bronze Age Levant.
Some initial observations . . .
timesofisrael.com/study-shows-ca… The study, published today in the journal Cell, is by a team of scholars including groups from Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University and David Reich's lab at Harvard
cell.com/cell/fulltext/…
May 17, 2020 • 19 tweets • 8 min read
The Guardian's travel section features Hester Stanhope, who "abandoned her privileged background . . . leading archaeological digs"

What's the truth?
(Hint: It has almost nothing to do with archaeology)
theguardian.com/travel/2020/ma… Stanhope was the granddaughter of William Pitt the Elder (niece of Pitt the Younger). But while she may have abandoned the familiarity of England, she hardly abandoned the privileged life of the aristocracy . . .
npg.org.uk/collections/se…
May 6, 2020 • 37 tweets • 14 min read
For hundreds of years, Europeans ground up Egyptian mummies so they could swallow them as medicine.

When they began to turn against mummy medicine and looked to blame someone for it, who did they scapegoat? The Jews, of course.

A thread . . . I realize I may have buried the lede here . . . but the practice of ingesting mummy deserves its own thread.
I have a piece in the works that deals with it a bit.
Dec 4, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Looks like Eisenbrauns/Penn State University Press have just published a large set of cuneiform tablets almost certainly looted and smuggled out of wartime Iraq.
eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/9… For anyone unfamiliar with the problems with Irisagrig tablets and interested in learning more, you might start with this thread: